Ted Nugent calls Africa a ‘country’, quotes MLK to defend Tea Party

Rocker and gun advocate Ted Nugent has found a new cause in the tea parties. He also apparently thinks Africa is a “country” that offers bountiful hunting experiences.

Appearing on a broadcast of Fox News’ Hannity on Friday, Nugent defended the conservative protesters, then took the opportunity to launch a series of rhetorical attacks on President Barack Obama.

“Everybody I hang with, the ranchers, the farmers, the cops, the teachers, the plumbers, everybody I hang with,” said Nugent. “They want to be a productive member of society and then they see an administration that is spitting on the US Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Ten Commandments, the Golden Rule.”

“So, we the tea partiers, we the people who are speaking up,” he continued.

“I’m going to quote my hero, Dr. Martin Luther King: ‘We who engage in non-violent direct action are not the cause of tension, but rather, bringing to the surface a tension that already exists,'” he said. “That’s the job of we the people to be watchdogs and whistleblowers. The government works for us. They are absolutely out of control.”

“You, Sean Hannity and Fox News, represent by word and deed the pulse of the most productive and conscientious members of this American dream across the board and I bring you a salute and a thank you,” said Nugent.

In a recent Washington Times column, Nugent blasted Obama and the four Supreme Court justices who dissented in a landmark case that overturned gun laws in cities like Chicago.

“With the Mao Zedong fan club in the White House, a clueless, rookie president hellbent on spending like a maniac as unprecedented debt piles up all around him, and every other imaginable indicator of an America turned upside-down, it comes as no surprise that this insane level of madness has metastasized into a Supreme Court where the Bill of Rights is being trashed by clueless, dangerously insulated old people intentionally disconnected from the real world, where the possession of a firearm often means the difference between life and death for good, innocent Americans every day of the year,” wrote Nugent.

Speaking to Hannity, Nugent expanded on this theme, suggesting “that patriot movie” was right about how, in foreign lands, productive people are often made victims by the ruling class. He added that he once told a Nigerian cab driver how much he loves the “country” of Africa because it offers such wonderful hunting.

Earlier in the interview the 61-year-old rocker claimed he was “61 years clean and sober,” which Hannity failed to challenge. However, when Nugent interviewed with High Times magazine years ago, he claimed to have urinated and defecated in his pants for a week while smoking large quantities of methamphetamine so that U.S. military draft officials would disqualify him from compulsory service in the Vietnam war.

When confronted by The Independent on these quotes, Nugent denied their veracity and instead claimed he had simply fabricated his responses to High Times because the interviewers came in with “glazed eyes.”

At the end of the interview, Hannity pressed Nugent for information on a potential campaign for public office, to which the rocker replied: “You never know. Nothing is off the table.”

Coming from the self-labeled “wild man” of southern rock — who once joked about “killing then-Senator Obama, called Hillary Clinton a “bitch” in front of a live audience and allegedly urinated on a nun — the preponderance of leveraging a political campaign under his banner is perhaps most correctly interpreted as a threat to public safety.

That is to say, at least it wouldn’t get boring.

This video is from Fox News’ Hannity, broadcast July 2, 2010 and uploaded to YouTube on July 3, 2010.